The City of Porvoo is looking for households to try out everyday sustainability solutions

The earth's resources are being depleted and climate change is worsening. How does this affect everyday life in Finland and what kind of services and products do we need in order to easier adopt sustainable lifestyles? All of this will be investigated in the international Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator. This project is coordinated by the German Wuppertal Institute and D-mat Oy in Finland, in collaboration with the City of Porvoo.

Households of any kind and size can now apply to join the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator, including large families, communes and one-person households. Households can apply to join the project up until 7 August. The activities begin right at the end of August and will continue with the selected households until the end of this year. We hope that the group of households taking part in the project represents different types of housing, residential areas and families in order to make the best use of the results in developing the city. Households may apply via the City of Porvoo's Internet service at www.porvoo.fi/kestava-kehitys-porvoossa (in Finnish) and www.porvoo.fi/etsimme-kotitalouksia-kokeilemaan-arkipaivan-kestavan-kehityksen-ratkaisuja (in Finnish).

This year, five to ten households are being searched for in Porvoo in order to take part in trying out future lifestyles. The objective is to find everyday solutions to reduce the carbon and material footprints. "If everyone lived like the Finns, we would need the natural resources of five planets Earth. The Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator tries to find out what it means in practice to live according to the resources of one single earth and which measures need to be adopted in order to achieve this. The households get to try out different services that make living a sustainable life possible. "We get to see how it is possible to lead a good life even with a shrinking carbon footprint," says Dr. Michael Lettenmeier, Managing Director of D-mat Oy and sustainable development expert.

The project gathers information for developing a more sustainable Porvoo and distributes information to households

First, the participating households will monitor their consumption. Based on the consumption, D-mat Oy calculates the household's carbon footprint, i.e. the greenhouse gas emissions, and the material footprint which means consumption of natural resources. Based on the footprints, the households take part in a workshop and develop their own roadmaps towards a more sustainable way of life. After this, each household picks measures from their roadmap they would like to try out during the one-month experiment period. In previous similar experiments, households were able to reduce their footprints by tens of per cents. For many of the households, this meant lower costs and an increase in life quality.

Possible new services to try might include, for example, car sharing, home delivery services, efficient living space solutions, sustainable and cost-effective ways of moving around and new sources of protein. The households and the experts together select the services to try out. After the households have tried out the relevant measures, options to scale up sustainable solutions for wider use will be discussed together with the city, the service-providers and other parties. The first phase of the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator is implemented during this year as a collaboration between D-mat Oy, the City of Porvoo and a set of experts and service-providers from seven different countries.

"The Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator enables us to see what sustainable life in Porvoo actually means. For the households, this means that they no longer have to wait for a better future because they are making it!" explains Community Planner Enni Flykt who coordinates the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator project at the City of Porvoo. The project gathers information for developing a more sustainable Porvoo and distributes information to households.